Top Five TV Shows, 2025

It's that time of year again, when I start putting together some top five lists (and desperately updating a website that I swore to myself I would keep current all year--I guess there's always 2026). This year I'm going to do three posts of top-five lists, just to give myself something to do over the holiday. I'm going to start with television because, y'all, TV has been good this year. A banquet, I tell you. For this list, outside of honorable mentions, I decided to confine myself to new shows. These are not the best shows, perhaps (except for my #1 spot), but they're my favorite from 2025. Counting from 5-1:

5. The Summer Hikaru Died
A boy goes missing; he returns different. So far, so standard. If you thought about it much, you could probably come up with a meaty handful of similar stories. What makes The Summer Hikaru Died different is that this change--the transformation of a young boy into something monstrous--isn't really the plot of the story. It's not a twist, not a big reveal. The protagonist Yoshiki Tsujinaka clocks it within the first episode and the remainder of the series involves him trying to come to terms with the fact that his friend Hikaru--with whom he was covertly in love--has been replaced with a nonhuman entity and he (Yoshiki) is kind of ok with it. Kind of. He's willing to make the trade-off in order to keep something of Hikaru around.

This show consistently surprised me. Every episode introduced a bizarre new element to the show's worldbuilding. The setting is a small town (hi!) in Japan, one of those small towns that have dark secrets embedded in their very geography. Much of the series follows these boys (or, like, the boy and his monster) as they try to figure out what, exactly the town's whole deal is. It's a fascinating, melancholy, and disturbing series. Well worth checking out.

4. Revenged Love
I'll fully admit that this one might be a nostalgia choice for me. One of my very first Chinese dramas was Counterattack: Falling in Love with a Rival. Watching that show was a janky, weird experience because I was relying on YouTube uploads and they were pretty inconsistent in terms of having subtitles, for instance, or appearing in anything like a reasonable order. Revenged Love is a glossy remake of that admittedly unpolished original. It follows Wu Suowei (Zi Yu), a down-on-his-luck guy who is dumped by his girlfriend and proceeds upon a quest for self-improvement that ultimately leads to him seducing his ex-girlfriend's new boyfriend Chi Cheng (Tian Xu Ning). Along the way there's snake kidnapping and more standard forms of kidnapping. It's a ridiculous plot and it's played almost completely straight. The lead actors are charming and talented and have more than enough chemistry to carry the series through multiple seasons (though, frankly, we're lucky to have gotten one). Especially with all the Heated Rivalry fans popping up, I really can't recommend this show enough.

3. Shine
I'm a simple man. Give me a historical drama full of politics and queerness and I'll probably dig it; Fellow Travelers was my favorite show of 2023 by a long shot, one I keep thinking about. Shine is kind of like Fellow Travelers in a Thai mode. Staring the powerhouse duo of Mile and Apo (from KinnPorsche), this series follows a university professor in Thailand right at the end of the 1960s as he deals with the political upheavals of the period.

Now, look, I'm no expert at Thai political history. I've tried to dig around a bit and learn some and from what I can tell it was as complicated there in 1969 as it was everywhere else. This series explores some of that, asking important questions about what an individual's responsibility is in a time of political upheaval. Which means, of course, that it's not just relevant to Thailand circa 1969; it speaks to today as well, globally.

2. IT: Welcome to Derry
It might be surprising, but IT: Welcome to Derry is not only better than its thematic rival Stranger Things; it's also better by a large margin than the movies it's spinning off from. The show accomplishes this by, for one thing, taking an actual interest in the time period it's set in. Taking its cues from the Stephen King novel, Welcome to Derry moves back in time to the 1960s to explore issues of race in Derry. Part of the theme of the novel is that the creature IT amplifies the darker instincts of the town's inhabitants. Thus, the novel (and the second movie) open (or at least partially lead off) with a queer-bashing, highlighting the homophobia of the story's original 1980s setting. In the 1960s, even in Maine, race would naturally be a major issue.

The series doesn't tackle these themes perfectly; I find its utilization of the mystical Native American theme to be a bit troubling. But it's exploring ideas and themes that anchor it firmly in the tradition of small-town fiction--as well as in the King novel from which it derives.

1. Pluribus
Pluribus is the best new show of the year by a substantial margin. I went into it knowing essentially nothing and, though I generally prefer to be spoiled, I'm kind of glad of my innocence here. The protagonist, Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn) is a spiky, unlikable figure. She reminds me a lot of the protagonist of The Prisoner in that her objections to being part of a hive mind are at once thoroughly reasonable and almost excessively abrasive. A lot of the discourse around the show, from what I can tell, revolves around poking at the meaning of this: is she a critique of American Individualism? American exceptionalism? American-- etc etc etc? And I think the answer, ultimately, is no. Carol is Carol--a deeply unhappy woman who has the one good thing in her life taken away from her and who struggles with that for the entirety of the season. One episode in particular resonated with me: when Carol, left to her own devices for something like forty days, slowly begins to disintegrate emotionally. Though the show was conceived well before the COVID-19 pandemic, it's difficult not to read Carol's response here as mirroring what so many of us went through in 2020.

In the end, Pluribus is a show about love--not love in the abstract, but love for particular people. Collectives cannot love; and an individual cannot love a collective. Only when a person truly sees and responds to another person can love exist. That, to me, is the real point of Pluribus.

HONORABLE MENTIONS

Obviously, these aren't the only shows I enjoyed this year. They're just my favorite. But here's a handful of honorable mentions, including returning series:

Heated Rivalry: IYKYK 
Severance: I know I compared Pluribus to The Prisoner, but this is the show that gives real Prisoner vibes. The episode where they go on a work retreat is maybe my favorite of the year.
Peacemaker: Gunn doesn't misfire. A masterpiece of character-work in a pulp mode.
Andor: It's hard to believe that Disney, of all companies, put out a show this radical. Essential viewing.

TV is good, y'all.

I'll be back in a couple of days with my (much more normie) movies list. Meanwhile, have a good one. Happy New Year!